US crisis clogs phone lines

pune: telephone and internet lines remained extremely busy even after 24 hours of the devastating terrorist attack on the world trade centre (wtc) in new york, with puneites making more than three lakh international calls. according to officials in the bharat sanchar nigam ltd. (bsnl) here, traffic of international subscriber dialling (isd) calls routed by it's trunk exchange (tax) at model colony was at least 15 times above normal.as many as 3.2 lakh international calls were made from pune between 7 p.m. on tuesday and 4 p.m. on wednesday. although all the calls may not have been to the u.s., a majority of them definitely were, r.l. dube, principal general manager of bsnl, said. even trunk call bookings were beyond expectation. as many as 1,500 trunk calls were booked for the u.s. from tuesday evening to wednesday afternoon, as against the 200 in normal circumstances, he said. given the unprecedented congestion on the isd network, it is not surprising that the dedicated telephony band-width of videsh sanchar nigam ltd. (vsnl) is getting clogged. k.p. tiwari, senior director (operations) of vsnl in mumbai, told this newspaper that getting through a call to the u.s. had become a problem on tuesday night, with too many people continuously dialling. asked why people were not able to log on to the internet, mr tiwari said everybody was trying to access particular websites and e-mail services at the same time. despite having a sufficiently huge bandwidth, the access was slow because every second person was trying to access cnn and bbc sites or sending e-mail, he said. however, several people called up this newspaper office even on wednesday morning to complain about the slow speed of internet connections.